I’m replying to “huuh” the idiot below. It’s just a metaphor, idiot. It means, idiot that no matter how good-looking a person is on the outside, idiot, he or she may be a bad or bitter or mean person. Got it, idiot?

From a DENTIST. Sure is a lot of misinformation in these comments. This is normal and not pathological, other than a bit of crowding. The buccal plates of bone have been removed so you can see the permanent teeth within the bone. Primary teeth have long roots but you never see them because they resorb as the permanent teeth begin eruption. By the time the “baby teeth” fall out, there is minimal root remaining. The lower front two teeth are the first to go, followed by the upper front two teeth.

The body takes the baby teeth roots back into itself (thus, resorbtion). The same thing can happen if you have trauma to one of your teeth (say like if you’re in a car accident or get hit in the face or something). I’m just a dental assistant, so I can’t tell you how or why, but it is definitely true.

By the action of the odontoclasts, similar to osteoclasts, they are responsible of the resorption process, separating the mineral portion and digesting the organic portion. The resorpted material is available for many different things, including new bone. All of this by the action of enzymes and ions.

Signe is correct. We have multiple skulls like this at my work place (i work at a dentistry teaching school) and Veronica this is in fact most likely a real donated skull of a child. We have many ranging from babies to elderly, to reptiles and large mammals including tiger and bear skulls that like this show the tooth roots or have not had the buccal plates removed. Sadly recently one of the students managed to break into the cabinet, and steal a childs skull (approx 9 years old), proceed to drop it then hid the broken pieces in their locker all summer and we are now in the process of trying to carefully reassemble it.

Actually, there’s a prevailing theory that Homo Sapiens has a much larger chin in comparison to Neanderthals because much more area was needed to anchor the muscles which control movement of the lips, and therefore speech. This however is somewhat based on the assumption that Neanderthals generally didn’t speak, or just spoke in grunts, as opposed to using their lips to aid in vocalization.

We learned last quarter that that particular assumption is mostly biased. Neanderthals actually had a specific gene that is acquainted with human’s ability to speak, as well as an accommodating physical structure for vocal capability. This doesn’t mean that they had refined language, but that we should at least give them a little more credit since no one truly knows what they were capable of. Neanderthals must have been able to communicate, because they understood symbols, and hunted in groups. Communication would have been imperative to their survival (they existed over 100,000 years as a species). I will say this, it is strongly believed that the reason they went extinct is because they lost out in the food competition once homo sapiens arrived in the neighborhood. The difference? Humans could adapt new techniques and strategies better, and therefore could adapt technologies to fit the environment.

It is more likely that Neanderthals are the same species as homo sapiens and were interbred with migrating populations from Africa to create the modern human population. Indeed, there is quite a bit of genetic overlap between the recently coded Neanderthal genome and certain populations of modern humans. Neanderthals walked upright, had less hair than most artistic interpretations, and were probably fairly intelligent.

Actually, the best theory I have heard is simply that the same gene that codes for size of the back of the skull also is the determinate gene for the jaw, so as our skulls grew bigger to hold bigger brains, our jaws elongated as a side effect.

I have no idea what you are reading, but our jaws have gotten shorter, not longer as we evolved. That’s why so many people today have impacted 3rd molars (wisdom teeth). Our jaws used to be big enough to accommodate those teeth and no longer are.

Sometimes, a person will actually have a third adult tooth in some spots.

My brother has all of his adult teeth, but has another tooth, still deep in the bone and unerupted, above his upper-right eye-tooth. He says that makes him feel more like a shark (which has several rows of teeth).

This is true…I myself had three upper canine teeth one each side. The third ones emerged a little above the the rest of my teeth across my gumline, so they do look like retracted vampire fangs, a little bit…I don’t have great teeth, obviously, but at least they’re all symmetrical, I guess…whatever that means…

My 15 month old daughter is teething (5 teeth out now, and the rest are slowly coming), and when I saw this picture, I was simultaneously horrified and fascinated with it….I show people the picture, and they think its scary or really disturbing..and it kind of is, but clearly its totally normal, ALL creature who have more than one set of teeth look like this underneath at some point. But good comments, most of you..

Speaking of extra teeth… wisdom teeth. Gah, I wish those were never invented. Adult teeth erupting serves an actual purpose. Wisdom teeth, on the other hand, only exist to plague you during your quarter life crisis, as if it wasn’t bad enough already…

(And no, I don’t need a humourless lecture on the actual evolutionary reasons for wisdom teeth, I’m just being facetious.)

Hey now, it might not just be squeamishness! I definitely had a trypophobic reaction to that image (it’s those holes where you can see the roots!). I’ve made sure it’s well out of my view on this page. And I bet Dario is saying to not Google it for the same reason I would say: A Google search produces the exact kind of images that bother a trypophobe… and some other images that could be considered disturbing to anybody.

Wikipedia is reliable. It’s lazy to trot out the tired cliche that it isn’t. In a sampling of articles, it was found to be more reliable than Britannica. Its structure means that if something is wrong, people will be passionate about correcting it immediately.

As with all sources, one should engage one’s brain before accepting it. That caveat taken; it’s a pretty great resource.

it’s only more reliable than Britannica because they stopped updating that years ago. all research is internet bound, and everyone always tells you not to believe everything from the internet… why do you think anyone can update a wiki page.

I never knew it had a name, either! My family always teases me for running (sometimes screaming) from gross holey things they occasionally try showing me online. They find such images fascinating, but I find them completely abhorrent and HAVE to get away and think happy thoughts. Now I know I’m not the only one!

Nothing as exciting as a chemical I’m afraid. It’s simply the pressure of the adult teeth on the baby tooth roots that cause it to resorb. A similar make up to bone, which will also resorb if under constant pressure, which is the principle used in orthodontics to move teeth, as teeth are harder than the surrounding bone.

Whatever it is that causes baby teeth to fall out did not work with me. Mine would not fall out and each baby tooth had to be extracted individually by a dentist. I have never “lost” a tooth. Any ideas why?

As a guess, you are like me and have a small jaw. It isn’t that the teeth didn’t loosen from the jaw, but rather that they were all so sqaushed together that they couldn’t fall out. I know at least one of the teeth I had pulled (which was all of my baby teeth, plus four adult ones, to make room) was so fragile it shattered when the dentist pulled on it.

Actually, it’s not true about it only being pressure. My daughter’s eye tooth went astray across the roots of the front teeth, and we have to get it out of there, because, the dentist says, the tooth has a sort of “halo” around it which dissolves the root of the baby tooth.

Unfortunately, if we don’t do anything it will begin to dissolve the roots of her front teeth and they will be in danger of falling out. So there is some kind of chemical reaction at work.

I agree with you on that. I have 2 baby teeth still and I’m 26 and it’s because there is a “sack” type thing that holds the adult too until it’s ready to come through and I was born with the sack but not the adult tooth for those 2 baby teeth. The surgeon had to go in and remove the sacks from inside my bottom jaw because there space bubbles so to speak in my jaw from them which makes it more susceptible to breaks because it’s not solid bone. Like air bubbles sort of.

An orthodontist told me, “there’s not much root left” on my baby eye tooth when I was 16. The adult tooth was (concealed) in the roof of my mouth and he removed the baby tooth – which then came down by itself – then he put a wire round my top teeth to pull it out to the right position. I later met a lady in her 40s who still had her baby eye tooth and the adult one still concealed in the roof of her mouth… so was he lying to me to get the $job?

Probably not – roots may resorb at different rates, or start to resorb and then stop, or you could have had short roots to begin with. Some people can manage to hang on to baby teeth their whole lives, some just don’t have the anchor to last past their 20s.

Actually, bones are living. The bones you see outside of the body are dead, but if you were to see them while they were living, they are not brittle at all. Problem is that you don’t really see bones unless they are outside, because it would be inhumane to cut into a living bone just to see it. They are magnificent organs.

Actually teeth do grow. The start off as a small bud and then slowly grow into a full sized tooth. If u were to look at a child’s xray u would see the bud stage of growing teeth. ie if theyre 13 you may see the bud of a wisdom tooth being developed. As a permanent tooth becomes full size its pressure will dissolve the root of the deciduous baby tooth which in turn pushes the tooth out.

Well it looks like the 12 year molars have erupted so probably closer to 11-12. Still…very sad. But you have to applaud the parents for allowing the child to be studied. Helps all of us who study in the medical field.

I don’t know anything about this skull, but a lot of the Hunterian collection was dissected either during the era of bodysnatchers, or after that when you were dissected if no-one could pay for your funeral. So the great likelihood is that the parents of this child had no say in his/her dissection.

It predates the point when sugary treats were a big part of the diet, predates antibiotics which discolour teeth – and then of course they would have cleaned the bones and teeth as part of the preparation.

I’ve seen this skull in the Hunterian, and handled a reasonable amount of real human bones and model ones. This is a real skull.

I can tell you from the image that this is almost certainly a real skull. It would be nigh on impossible to produce a model that reproduces the fine detail so well, particularly in the porous parts of the bone which has been exposed by dissection.

Also the teeth appear particularly white as the skull will have been bleached during preparation.

I’m not sure where you acquired this piece of misinformation, but I can tell you from experience that baby teeth can and do have long roots. I had to have several teeth pulled as a child and many of them had long roots such as the ones shown in the picture.

Not true. When I was preparing to have my braces put on, my orthodontist had to extract four of my baby teeth. I know this is weird, but we still have them and for this reason: I was absolutely amazed by them; the root was EXTREMELY long, just like these! I couldn’t believe it!

Wow! You know computers can produce simulations nowadays. I appreciate the lesson you are trying to teach us but did you really have to kill and skin some poor little kid to do it? Too far dude, just too damn far.

You’re probably trolling, but since this seems an educational thread anyway…

Long before computer simulated models and plastic teaching models (which are OK but not much like a real body), medics, dentists etc learned from all sorts of resources, including diagrams, wax models, and especially importantly, real human tissue including skeletons and dissection. There are many things you can’t learn from a picture (or from a plastic model). We all know much of this material used to come from criminals back in the day (and not all was ethically gotten), but these days it’s down to people who donate their bodies to science. Given that this is a museum exhibit, it could be from a medical school specimen (often criminals or poor people in the old days, now volunteers) or from something the museum dug up during excavations. Looking at the quality and careful preparation (bleaching possibly, and removal of some bone to see the teeth), it’s probably a medical school specimen.

I saw this pic on CollegeHumor.com the other day and was so disgusted by it. My family didn’t see why it bothered me so much. Now I know it’s trypophobia. I didn’t itch while watching the video, but I had to turn away several times. I HATE holey, porous things. Glad to know I’m not the only one.

That actually happened to me. One of my baby teeth didn’t fall out at the right time and the adult tooth erupted behind it. To this day, I still have one tooth that’s a whole tooth’s-length behind the others. Sure, it’s unsightly, but it’s also expensive and strictly cosmetic to fix it. Besides, it gives me an interesting mouth-related story, which I’m always pretty excited about.

Well, we only get two set of teeth. We’d need a new one by 30 and another one by 50. Humans in real life would probably only reach the age of 25-40 at most. To not die of being eaten/wounded by another animal or infection for that long is itself a miracle. Today humans only live long because of the “technology” and diet. Sadly we bring that curse to other animals in our surroundings, well, beside those that we extinct.

Humans are a plague on this planet. It’s so sad that many of us actually think of us more than “humans” like we’re some sort of divine creature blessing the ground we walk upon. If we would have a catastrophic event occur on this planet the majority of humans would die out mostly due to having no knowledge how to survive. Including myself of course since i too am cursed. You really think humans are kind creatures? Every human will become vicious in the correct circumstances.

Sorry for going all out like this i just got offended by some of the hypocrits. It’s “unfortunate” that this exist? Are you bloody serious. I am glad it exist as it’s a proof that we all can and will die.

That’s not beauty. Its totally freaky. How painful it must be to have all those teeth growing in at once. Anyone remember when they were that age and all their teeth were growing in: How beautiful they felt?

Coming from the prospective of a physical anthropologist this child was young as none of the deciduous teeth have erupted yet. It’s hard to tell looking at juvenile skulls, but from the rounded nature of the orbits, s/he is likely from Africa or Asia. there are no signs of trauma or Harris lines on the teeth, so they lived a fairly calm life. Though, from the wear marks on the teeth this child would have had some issues eating with the pathological arrangement on the lower incisors.

Wow, that is mazing and creepy all at the same time, and possibly a record number of posts (or was your Fox News crucifixtion story the most?) I have always wondered if any parent has ever donated their child’s body to science to be studied. Does anyone know? I understand why you wouldn’t, and just can’t explain why I wonder if anyone actually could do it, from a strictly psychological perspective.

My DD lost her first teeth at 4. Now she is almost 6 and lost almost all her baby teeth and has her molars.. At her last dentist visit she showed me a xray and all her permanent tooth were there and it showed that for the two upper front there roots were completly disolved a sign that they well fall in any moment.

I had poor teeth as a kid, still do, so I saw plenty of x-rays of teeth at various life stages, and my mom is a nurse, so I got used to hearing about and seeing all sorts of stomach churning things, and to this day I still watch medical procedures and documentaries on tv, etc, but THIS creeps me out for some reason…

Can someone please tell me what happens to the holes in the top and jaw that hold the adult teeth once they have emerged? I agree, this makes me feel creepy, I feel like digging all the teeeth out of their spaces, it makes me feel really funny.

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I had all my teeth when I was 1. So sadly my jaw was too small to take on normal form when I got older, which left me with the ugliest bottom front teeth I could have ever wanted. I honestly hate my mouth and have yet to find a dentist that could help me out, let alone I more than likely wouldnt be able to afford it.

But yea, hate my terribly crooked teeth and seeing this kind of helps me realize how exactly they ended up that way.

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